The blog prompt is officially over, but I thought I’d spend the next couple of weeks catching up on the topics I’d missed. I’ve had a very busy week this week, but days 29 and 30 are nice and short, so I thought I’d catch them up together. Here goes: 10 things about me: I wasn’t sure if this should be the 10 most important things, or the 10 most surprising, or some other criteria, so I did 10 random things.

I met my husband almost 26 years ago at our college motorbike club.

I became a mum for the first time in 2011. I’m not sure how I imagined it would be, but it’s not like that so far 🙂

I love to craft and have a teensy weensy problem resisting buying patterned paper, rubber stamps and embossing folders.

For the past 6 years I’ve funded my craft addiction and explored my hobby by doing demos and magazine work for do crafts. Seeing my work in print makes me stupidly happy.

When I was 21 I graduated in physics, started working as a trainee engineer for a missile company, and wouldn’t have believed points 2, 3 or 4 🙂

My grandmother’s sudden death 10 years ago prompted me to downshift so that I could break out of a work-eat-sleep lifestyle, spend less time at airports, and spend more time with my family and friends.

I spent a year volunteering part time in the fabric workshop at the Shuttleworth Collection, where I helped to re-cover their Tiger Moth – stitching the fabric to the wings was my favourite job.

I love mountains and the sea, but live in one of the flattest and most inland counties in England. I’m not sure how this happened.

My favourite colours are yellow and purple. The first time I was asked what colour room I wanted as a little girl, I chose really dark purple. It was *brilliant*.

I’m a keen geocacher. For those of you who are not familiar with the hobby, it involves using a GPS to hide (typically) bits of tupperware in the countryside and to look for the tupperware other people hid before you. It’s a lot more fun than it sounds 😉

Shelacking the SE5a wings

I rubbed all the fabric down at least once – that’s a lot of rubbing!

With Tiny Tears in my purple palace

5 things I love:

My family, of course, and creative pursuits. These are both so obvious, I bagsy they can be doubled up so I only use one of my 5 🙂

Spitfires, the flying kind. Well, I love anything with a Merlin engine really, but the Spitfire is so beautiful and elegant, and was so important in winning the Battle of Britain that it will always be extra special to me. When the oil runs out, I hope they save the last bit for one last Spitfire display.

The great outdoors. I’ve always loved walking in the countryside, but barely did any of it towards the end of when I worked full time – I really didn’t feel like me. Now I’m fortunate to be able to walk several miles every day – according to my GPS I managed 1300 miles while pregnant.

Food! I’m always very sad when people say they’re not interested in food. We all have to eat, most of us do it 3 times a day, and our bodies have to replace 10-50 trillion cells a day using only what we eat and breathe in. It makes sense to make our food both pleasurable to eat and as good for us (or at least as un-bad) as possible. For me, this manifests itself as an interest in cooking and what’s in food that borders on obsession!

Photographs. I say photos rather than photography because the mechanics of taking a good photo only interests me in as much as I have to know it to end up with a good photo. If I could just click a button on the side of my head and save how I see a scene, or if I could have a super-intelligent camera that I could just talk to, I’d be much happier than having to muck around with aperture sizes and exposure times. I feel so lucky to live in an age when we can record so much of our lives for posterity. I’ve only dabbled in scrapbooking so far, but I’m really looking forward to getting properly stuck in!